Warming Up

I went to bed at 8pm tonight. What has become of me? 

I had managed to keep going all day, which is tricky after a podcast day, and even gone for a run (though had to walk half of it). But I’d done a solo bedtime with the kids, miraculously having got my son down and to sleep straight away and had some real fun with my daughter. I could easily have gone to bed at 7pm after them, but I stayed up to help with a grocery delivery. And then bang. Out like a light with the promise of 10 hours sleep ahead of me.

Nothing could make me happier right now. 

Did I ever think that I would take being asleep at 8pm beyond any other type of pleasure? Could there be a greater gift for me than an uninterrupted night? That will never happen for me, even when the kids have grown up and left the house, because I don’t think it’s possible for me to sleep the night without a couple of visits to the toilet. Maybe if I didn’t ingest any liquid for 24 hours, but even then I think my body would produce wee from something. What’s wrong with it? 

If I could just reason with my bladder I would tell it that I would happily let it wee a hundred times in waking hours if it could just shut up and give me a rest for the sleeping ones. But my bladder won’t be reasoned with.

My bladder won’t be reasoned with.

At least since I share stopped drinking I do not wake up in the middle of the night feeling confused and afraid any more. I am having some very vivid and weird dreams though. Tonight I dreamed I was driving the pretend car that I’d made out of bits of playpen for my kids out on the actual road. My only worry was that as it had no wheels it was low down and might not get seen by the other cars. But aside from that I saw nothing unusual about driving a playpen around the streets. When I told my daughter about this she was properly jealous and said, “Oh I wish I had dreams like that.”

We’d been out to celebrate my mother-in-law’s birthday but I resisted the champagne and clocked up my 65th day alcohol (and chocolate) free. Limmy gave up drinking when he was on the point of throwing himself into a river. He just decided that that was the end of it. And I wondered if this time that that might be the case for me. Not the throwing myself in the river bit. I am enjoying being alive and hoping to get another 20 years. But maybe I have drunk enough. Maybe I don’t need to go back this to it this time. Maybe I’ve had my last drink.

Weirder things have happened.

Not to me admittedly.

Maybe I should have one more drink, just so I remember my last drink. I didn’t even consciously decide to stop drinking this year. I just knew I wanted to diet and so cutting down on booze would be necessary. And look at me now. Thinking about never going back, of getting thinner and actually staying thinner.

I did think about going to get my old suits out of the attic today and to see how far off I was from fitting into them. It’s still going to be a while. But I am lighter than I have been since I moved into this house now and maybe only 4kgs away from the weight I was when I last squeezed into my suits. Though to be fair, the suits didn’t exactly fit at that point.

But I can definitely say I am on the right trajectory for now and that this time the diet has taken hold and is working. And if I never drink or eat chocolate again then I will have disappeared to nothing in just 91 more weeks.